Courtney "Harbinger" Palmer

Brief: Redesign a known story character, draft, toil, fit, and final.

Photography by Mark Vawser of Castleforge Photography, modeled by Jon Oogjen

Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet (Disney Studios, 2002), a bold, rebellious teen who sets out on a coming of age adventure through space.
The original character design has a base earthy colour palette with an oversize fit, cropped jacket and is very reminiscent of the late 1990s and early 2000s fashion styles. In the redesign these elements were incorporated and updated towards a more detailed sci-fi and live action style.
The costume consists of boots, exaggerated straight leg cargo pants, base shirt with 3/4 sleeves, cropped jacket and poncho. Elements of bright, almost neon, green feature throughout the costume to tie each piece together and as a representation of the strong theme colour throughout the original 2002 animation.

The initial design process included throwing down as many ideas as possible towards what the character redesign would look like. Finding inspiration from the film, the original novel, sci-fi tropes, and pulling inspiration from the work of designers I admired (namely use of texture and layering to create looks), and techniques I had become enamored with throughout the time of my study. Through this process I was able to identify trends and preferences through the various ideas that I found more visually interesting, and what resonated best with the character.

model: Jon Oogjen

The final product took approximately 90 hours to complete from drafting the initial patterns to the completed sewing and finishing of details. The sleeves in the shirt feature hexagon shaped North American style smocking and the pattern for this technique was developed as a part of this project.

Pattern/fabric information: